AI: Startup Vs Incumbent Value

Unlike the prior wave of AI startups, there are a clear set of infrastructure-centric companies with broad adoption and rapidly growing usage - this includes OpenAI, Stability.AI, Hugging Face, Weights and Biases, and others. While revenue is lagging usage for a subset of companies in this segment, it is ramping quickly in a manner not atypical for... See more

In each technology wave the value, revenue, market cap, profits and great people captured by startups versus incumbents differs. In some waves it all goes to startups, while in others it goes to incumbents or is split between them. Unexpectedly, the prior wave of value from AI roughly all went to incumbents over startups, despite a lot of startup a... See more

OpenAI is now the clear leader in LLM APIs - a position that 4 years ago Google was arguably in the default position to win. The failure of Google to capitalize on its many advantages specifically in AI has been striking. It feels like a Xerox Parc moment of inventing transformers, having all the talent, data, and distribution to build the seminal ... See more

While many of the prior innovations in AI were striking and exciting (AlexNet, CNNs, RNNs, GANs etc) this time does feel different for a few reasons. There is reason to believe while incumbents should capture a good amount of the value in this wave, startups will take a bigger share of AI generated value this time around.

Many of the largest scale uses of AI to date have been at consumer-centric companies that have large data sets to train on (Google, Facebook, Uber, etc). Perhaps incumbents won due to a data advantage that is now going away as companies use the broader internet as an initial training set + are switching to models that work more robustly against sma... See more

This time, the technology seems dramatically stronger, which means it is easier to create 10X better products to overcome incumbent advantages. The "why now" may simply be a technology sea change.